Back in July at Hackcon III, I announced the creation of the Major League Hacking Community Council. There are, and always have been, community members that we reach out to for advice and feedback. But as the student hacker community has grown, we’ve discovered that there’s a big advantage to having a more structured way to gather feedback from the people who love and have a deep stake in the success of student hackers around the world.
The MLH Community Council is a rotating board of active community members representing hackers, organizers, sponsors, and non-student developer community experts. The council is responsible for helping us figure out the best way to serve student hackers and to bring diverse perspectives to the table to discuss important community issues. We’re just getting started, but so far we’ve been talking with them about everything from MLH’s day-to-day operations to broader community concerns beyond the league.
If you don’t know all of these amazing people already, we encourage you to get to know them soon. They’re smart, insightful, and care deeply about this community.
Eddie Zaneski is a Developer Evangelist at Twilio. He has a passion for open source and education. You may have seen him running around at a hackathon fixing bugs and teaching hackers about JavaScript and the interwebs. Eddie graduated from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ where he helped run the Rutgers hackathon, HackRU, and traveled the globe attending as many hackathons as he could. He later went on to evangelize SendGrid before recently joining his current team.
Jessica Rose is a self-taught technologist with a focus on fostering access to technical education and digital spaces. She’s founded Open Code, co-founded Trans*Code and works with community development and developer outreach for DreamFactory. She’s always excited to hear about new projects, so find her to tell her what you’ve been working on!
Kaylyn Gibilterra is a software engineer at Capital One Labs and helps lead the company’s hackathon presence. Outside of work, Kaylyn is a founder and director of the Women Who Code DC Network. She loves GoLang, and the color maroon.
Mamadou Diallo is a hackathon guru currently in his senior year of high school. He enjoys coding websites and iOS apps in addition to solving problems that makes people’s lives better. Mamadou is also the Co-founder of The Young Hackers, an organization dedicated to connecting and empowering a diverse new generation of programmers. Mamadou really enjoys basketball, Bing’s Search Engine, and loves to freestyle rap-battle.
Naomi Pentrel currently studies Computer Science at the University of Oxford and is a passionate hackathon organizer. During her undergraduate studies at Jacobs University Bremen she became one of the founders of jacobsHack!, one of the first big international student-run hackathons in Europe with students from over 50 universities and 40 nationalities. Naomi also helped in the organization of the Women’s International Leadership Conference, a student-led initiative providing a platform for advocacy, dialogue, and inspiration in the interest of advancing women’s roles in the professional sphere.
While pursuing a medical device startup, Stef Cohen joined a community of makers and entrepreneurs at Startup Shell, a student-run startup incubator at University of Maryland. Currently, she is the Membership Director and helps build entrepreneurial and maker communities at UMD. Through these communities, she was introduced to Major League Hacking, where she enjoys combining art and technology at hackathons.
A second-year CS student at the University of Michigan, Tyler Laredo has been an active member on the MHacks leadership team, successfully planning three hackathons throughout the last year. This year, as MHacks’ Director of Sponsorship, Tyler successfully led a team of five students to acquire 60 sponsors from leading F500 companies, build a proprietary resume collection database, redefine the MHacks project judging model, and bolster sponsor satisfaction to an entirely new level. As a new member on the MHacks Board of Directors, Tyler is recruiting new members for the MHacks core team, training the next Director of Sponsorship, and helping formulate the vision of future MHacks events.
We are extremely excited to be able to work alongside these talented individuals to support the student hacking movement. If you ever have questions, comments, or concerns feel free to e-mail us at hi@mlh.io
Happy hacking!
-Swift